Soil microbes are low-cost, efficient markers of buried resources

The Challenge

Extraction of natural resources, including rare earth metals, is critical to maintaining societal functions and transitioning to greener technologies like electric vehicles and wind turbines. Mineral deposits that can be detected at surface level are increasingly rare, resulting in increased expenditures on prospecting to search for resources below the earth’s surface.

Current prospecting practices are costly and time-consuming. They rely on a combination of geologic, geophysical, and geochemical tools that suggest general areas for exploration. Narrowing down the specific location of resources within these areas then typically requires expensive drilling machinery to take samples at depth across large grids.

Identifying new surface-level indicators of buried resources that narrow the search for mineralization at depth could increase the efficiency of expensive prospecting and exploration efforts.

The Solution

Recent discoveries have found that microbes in surface soils can indicate buried resources tens of meters underground. Identifying microbial indicators could substantially narrow the search space to increase efficiency in mineral prospecting.

Microbes in soil have huge potential as highly-sensitive indicators of their environments. Because of their unique metabolisms, certain highly specialized microbes thrive best in the presence of specific nutrients, environmental conditions, or presence of metals. Thousands of years of evolution can now be transformed into bioprospecting.

Koonkie’s Approach

Koonkie's team of biologists, bioinformaticians, and computer scientists have the highly-specific expertise required to find these indicators. Koonkie uses DNA sequencing to decode which microbes are present in specific soils and sorts through huge amounts of data to find the rare organisms that thrive above buried resources. This low-cost method can increase the efficiency of traditional prospecting techniques and the process of extracting minerals at large.

Want to learn more? Reach out to services@koonkie.com to schedule a consultation.

Reference: Siminster et al. Communications Earth and Environment (2023)

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